I laugh when I think about college students today. They go off to school with interior designers, then buy curtains, expensive sheets, nice furniture, throw pillows and wonderful décor for their apartments and dorm rooms.
I believe this is fundamentally wrong. College may be the only time in your life when it is perfectly acceptable to live in poverty. It’s a rite of purification.
During my four years, I experienced just about every type of college accommodation there was: the dorm, the apartment and the fraternity house.
And one semester, I lived in a closet. Really.
It was certainly not an extra bedroom. This apartment could barely sleep two people, and I’m pretty sure the fire marshal would have had some questions about the setup we came up with. But it worked. Thank goodness.
During the second half of my freshman year, I roomed with two of my high school friends in an apartment. And I actually had a bed.
The following semester, Uncle Sam claimed one of my roomies, throwing our living arrangements askew. And somehow, due to a communication breakdown – I like to think it was – I found myself starting the fall semester with no place to live. Essentially homeless.
Before I began searching for refrigerator boxes to live in, or worse, going back to a dorm, I approached two friends who were splitting a one-bedroom apartment. I appealed to their sense of decency.
They wanted to help. The problem was that there simply wasn’t anywhere to put another person.
This was an efficiency apartment, and that was being generous. I had seen more space in a Volkswagen. There was barely enough room to hang a Farrah Fawcett poster.
However, once I stepped into the closet, I had a stroke of genius. Or maybe it was just a stroke.
“What if I sleep on a mattress in the closet and we split the rent three ways?”
They looked at me. I looked at them. And apparently nobody could come up with a better plan.
At some level, it appealed to all three of us. Like most college students, we were struggling financially, so it seemed like a win-win situation. I would have a place to live, and they would have another person helping with the rent. The only difference was that at night, my bed was a mattress in the closet.
And so it began. One of my new roommates, in a thoughtful gesture, or perhaps as a semester-long practical joke, strung some beads across the opening of the closet to give me a little privacy. Classy.
It didn’t turn the closet into a master suite, but at least I had a semblance of a doorway.
There was definitely an adjustment period for all three of us. Unfortunately for me, one of my roommates had an 8 o’clock class on the day I had a 10 o’clock. That meant he was rooting around the closet for his shoes or a sweatshirt or a raincoat while I was trying to get an extra hour of sleep. At times like that, it might have been easier to sleep in a cardboard box.
To further complicate matters, I had acquired a girlfriend during the summer, and those beads offered very little in the way of privacy.
In the unlikely event you’ve tried to maintain a romantic relationship while sleeping in a closet, let me save you some trouble. Lying on a mattress in a closet, with someone else’s T-shirts and sneakers as your only decor, can be a serious mood killer.
A few times during the semester, both roommates would go home for the weekend and give me a couple of days of normalcy. I got to spend a couple of nights in a real bed. It felt like the Presidential Suite at the Waldorf Astoria rather than a student apartment that was smaller than Barbie’s house.
Honestly, once you got past the humiliation of sleeping in a closet, it really wasn’t that bad. Aside from the seven hours a night I spent sleeping, it was pretty much like being a visitor. And being in the closet muffled the sound in case anybody in the bedroom was snoring. The bathroom arrangements were managed without much problem – remember, it was three guys. And we had a little more money in our pockets – money that was probably funneled into fast-food joints or student bars downtown. Some of it may have been wasted, too.
In the meantime, I had made some connections with guys at a fraternity I really liked.
So, when the spring semester rolled around, I traded my closet for a bed in a frat house. I stayed there until I graduated.
It was a lot like the dorm from the first semester, except it was more intimate. There was one floor, and I knew everybody. We also ate together, socialized together and grew up together.
And all of that happened after I finally came out of the closet.
Joe Hobby is a barbecue-loving comedian from Alabama who wrote for Jay Leno for many years. Find more of Joe’s stories on his blog at mylifeasahobby.blogspot.com. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/JoeHobbyComedian.
